True Murder

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Eleven year old Ajuba has been abandoned at a Devon boarding school by her Ghanaian father. Haunted by the circumstances of her mother's breakdown and the ghosts of the life she left behind in Ghana, she falls under the spell of new girl Polly Venus and her chaotic, glamorous family. But all is not what it might seem in the Venus household and Ajuba struggles to make sense of things as they tear each other apart in front of her. One day the girls find what they think are a dead kittens wrapped up in an old coat in the attic of the Venus' manor house...the bones turn out to be those of a dead baby. Obsessed with the detectives of the American magazine serial "True Murder", the girls set out to find outwhat happened to the baby. As the summer draws to a close, three tragedies conflate, with catastrophic results. In this assured debut, Yaba Badoe explores a passionate, if unlikely friendship between two troubled adolescent girls and the dysfunctional and ultimately destructive power of love.

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Yaba Badoe is a Ghanaian-British documentary filmmaker and journalist. A graduate of King's College Cambridge, she worked as a civil servant in Ghana before becoming a General Trainee with the BBC. She has taught in Spain and Jamaica and is, at present, a Visiting Scholar at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana, where she is completing a documentary film -The Witches of Gambaga. Her short stories have been published in Critical Quarterly and in African Love Stories: an anthology edited by Ama Ata Aidoo.